Physics Set #1

Your pet hamster sits on a record player whose angular speed is constant. If he moves to a point twice as far from the center, then his linear speed

DOUBLES

Which moves faster in m/s on a merry-go-around: a horse on the inside or a horse on the outside near the outer rail?

OUTSIDE HORSE

If a turntable rotational speed is doubled, then the linear speed of a pet hamster sitting on the edge of the record will

DOUBLE

Suppose the circumference of a bicycle wheel is 2 meters. If it rotates at 1 revolution per second when you are riding the bicycle, then your speed will be

2 M/S

An industrial flywheel has a greater rotational inertia when most of its mass is

NEAREST THE RIM

A coin and a ring of equal masses and equal diameters roll down an incline, starting from rest at the same time. The one to reach the bottom first will be

COIN

A torque acting on an object tends to produce

ROTATION

On a balanced seesaw, a boy three times as heavy as his partner sits:

1/3 THE DISTANCE FROM THE FULCRUM

Put a pipe over the end of a wrench when trying to turn a stubborn nut on a bolt, to effectively make the wrench handle twice as long, you will multiply the torque by

TWO

A leaning tower of Pisa doesn't topple over because its center of gravity is

ABOVE THE PLACE OF SUPPORT

A chef at a pizzeria tosses a spinning disk of unbaked pizza dough into the air. The disk dismeter increases during the flight, while its rotational speed

DECREASES

Centrifugal forces are an apparent reality to observers in a reference frame that is

ROTATING

A person weighs less at the equator than at the poles. The main reason for this has to do with

THE SPIN OF THE EARTH

When a twirling ice skater brings her arms inward, her rotational speed

INCREASES

Consider a rotating donut-shaped space habitat, where living quarters are on the inside surface fartherst from the axis of rotation. If the rotational speed of the habitat increases, the apparent weight of people inside

INCREASES

The center of gravity of a circular disk of sheet metal is located

AT THE CENTER OF THE DISK

A carnival has a Ferris wheel where the seats are located halfway between the center and the outside rim. If you were sitting not in a seat but on the outside rim, your angular speed while riding on this Ferris wheel would be

THE SAME AS WHEN YOU WERE RIDING IN THE SEAT

For a system in mechanical equilibrium, the resultant

TORQUE AND FORCE MUST BE ZERO

A ball rolls down a hill mainly because of

AN UNBALANCED TORQUE

A car travels in a circle at a constant speed. The net force on the car is

DIRECTED TOWARDS THE CENTER OF THE CAR

A huge rotating cloud of particles in space gravitate together to form an increasingly dense ball of particles. As the cloud shrinks in size, it

ROTATES FASTER

If the polar icecaps melted, the resulting water would spread over the entire Earth. This new mass distribution would tend to make the length of the day

LONGER

Suppose you are at the center of a large freely-rotating horizontal turntable in a carnival funhouse. As you crawl towards the edge, the angular momentum of you and the turntable

STAYS THE SAME

As a rotating ice skater stretches out his arms

HIS ROTATIONAL INERTIA INCREASES

Suppose you put very large-diameter tires on your car. Then, your speedometer will show a speed that is